Kate Morton - The Distant Hours

To a casual observer, unaware of the previous day’s announcement, it might have appeared that all was unchanged in the heart of Milderhurst village. People were still going about their business, shopping for groceries, chatting in small groups outside the post office, but Percy knew better. There was no wailing or gnashing of teeth, it was more subtle than that and perhaps the sadder for it. Impending war was evidenced by the faraway expression in the older villagers’ eyes, the shadows on their faces, not of fear but of sorrow. Because they knew; they had lived through the last war and they remembered the generation of young men who had marched away so willingly and never come back. Those too, like Daddy, who had made it home but left in France a part of themselves that they could never recover. Who surrendered to moments, periodically, in which their eyes filmed and their lips whitened, and their minds gave over to sights and sounds they wouldn’t share but couldn’t shake.

Percy and Saffy had listened together to Prime Minister Chamberlain’s announcement on the wireless the day before and had sat through the national anthem in deep thought.

‘I suppose we shall have to tell him now,’ Saffy had said eventually.

‘I suppose so.’

‘You’ll do it, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘Choose your moment carefully? Find a way to keep him sensible?’

‘Yes.’

For weeks they’d put off mentioning to Daddy the likelihood of war. His most recent descent into delusion had further ruptured the tissue connecting him to reality and he’d been left swinging between extremes like the pendulum in the grandfather clock. One moment he seemed perfectly reasonable, speaking to her intelligently of the castle and of history and the great works of literature, the next he was hiding behind chairs, sobbing in fear of imagined spectres, or giggling like a cheeky schoolboy, begging Percy to come paddling with him in the brook, telling her he knew the best place for collecting frogspawn, that he’d show her if only she knew how to keep a secret.

When they were eight years old, in the summer before the Great War started, she and Saffy had worked with Daddy on making their own translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight . He would read the original Middle English poetry and Percy would close her eyes as the magical sounds, the ancient whispers, surrounded her.

‘Gawain felt etaynes that hym anelede ,’ Daddy would say: ‘the giants blowing after him, Persephone. Do you know how that feels? Have you ever heard the voices of your ancestors breathing from the stones?’ And she would nod, and curl up tighter beside him, and close her eyes while he continued…

Things had been so uncomplicated then, her love for Daddy had been so uncomplicated. He’d been seven foot tall and fashioned of steel and she’d have done and thought anything to be approved of by him. So much had happened since, though, and to see him now, his old face adopting the avid expressions of childhood, was almost too much for Percy to bear. She would never have confessed it to anyone, certainly not to Saffy, but Percy could hardly stand to look at Daddy when he was in one of what the doctor called his ‘regressive phases’. The problem was the past. It wouldn’t leave her alone. Nostalgia was threatening to be her ball and chain, which was an irony because Percy Blythe did not go in for sentimentality.

Netted by unwanted melancholy, she wheeled her bicycle the final short distance to the church hall and propped it against the wooden face of the building, careful not to squash the vicar’s garden bed.

‘Good morning, Miss Blythe.’

Percy smiled at Mrs Collins. The old dear who, in some inexplicable curvature of time, had seemed ancient for at least three decades, had a knitting bag strung over one arm and was clutching a fresh-baked victoria sponge. ‘Oh, but Miss Blythe,’ she said with a woeful shake of her fine silvery curls, ‘did you ever think it would come to this? Another war?’

‘I hoped it wouldn’t, Mrs Collins, I really did. But I can’t say I’m surprised, human nature being what it is.’

‘But another war.’ The curls shivered again. ‘All those young boys.’

Mrs Collins had lost both her sons to the Great War, and although Percy had no children of her own, she knew what it was to love so fiercely that it burned. With a smile, she took the cake from her old friend’s trembling grasp and hooked one of Mrs Collins’s arms over her own. ‘Come on, my dear. Let’s go inside and find ourselves a seat, shall we?’

The Women’s Voluntary Service had decided to meet in the church hall for their sewing bee after certain vocal members of the group had declared the larger village hall, with its wide wooden floor and lack of ornamental detail, a far more suitable site for the processing of evacuees. As Percy took in the huge crowd of eager women clustered around the assembled tables, however, setting up sewing machines, rolling out great swathes of fabric from which to make clothing and blankets for the evacuees, bandages and swabs for the hospitals, she thought that it might have been a foolish choice. She wondered too how many of this number would drop away after the initial excitement wore off, then chastised herself for being uncharitably sour. Not to mention hypocritical, for Percy knew she’d be the first to make her excuses just as soon as she found another way to contribute to the war effort. She was no use with a needle and had come today simply because, while it was the duty of all to do what they could, it was the duty of Raymond Blythe’s daughters to give what they couldn’t a damn good go.

She helped Mrs Collins into a seat at the knitting table, where conversation, as might be expected, was about the sons and brothers and nephews who were set to join up, then delivered the victoria sponge to the kitchen, careful to avoid Mrs Caraway, who was wearing the same dogged expression that always presaged delivery of a particularly nasty task.

‘Well now, Miss Blythe.’ Mrs Potts from the post office reached out to accept the offering, held it up for inspection. ‘And what a lovely rise you’ve managed here.’

‘The cake comes courtesy of Mrs Collins. I’m merely its courier.’ Percy attempted a swift escape, but Mrs Potts, practised in conversational entrapment, cast her net too fast.

‘We missed you at ARP training on Friday.’

‘I was otherwise engaged.’

‘What a pity. Mr Potts always says what a wonderful casualty you make.’

‘How kind of him.’

‘And there’s no one can wield a stirrup pump with quite so much verve.’

Percy smiled thinly. Sycophancy had never been so tiresome.

‘And tell me, how’s your father?’ A thick layer of hungry sympathy coated the question and Percy fought the urge to plant Mrs Collins’s marvellous sponge right across the postmistress’s face. ‘I hear he’s taken a bad turn?’

‘He’s as well as might be expected, Mrs Potts. Thank you for asking.’ An image came to her of Daddy some nights ago, running down the hallway in his gown, cowering behind the stairs and crying like a frightened child, sobbing that the tower was haunted, that the Mud Man was coming for him. Dr Bradbury had been called in and had left stronger medicine for them to administer, but Daddy had quivered for hours, fighting against it with all he had, until finally he fell into a dead sleep.

‘Such a pillar of the community.’ Mrs Potts affected a sorrowful tremor. ‘Such a shame when their health begins to slide. But what a blessing he has someone like you to carry on his charitable works. Especially in a time of national emergency. People around here do look to the castle when times are uncertain – they always have.’